could offer as to her whereabouts. The screen went black, and Vail feared that the battery was finally dead. He waited a few interminable seconds but there was no more.
It started to rain. He turned on the wipers and let their rhythm hypnotize him for a moment. Then he closed his eyes tightly, trying to recall every detail of the building. It was more Victorian than anything else, but with some possible French influence. The architectural details were so elaborately overdesigned that he judged the structure to be at least a hundred years old. But how did you find a list of hundred-year-old buildings in Los Angeles, if he was even right about the age? Then suddenly it occurred to him that he had seen the building somewhere before, not from that angle, but from street level, maybe the day Bertok was killed. The windows were unusual, projecting out from the building face at least two feet and complex in their detail. They were bordered with stone pillars, the crowns of which were semicircles capped with triangles. He hadn’t been to that many places in Los Angeles, so hopefully it was retrievable from wherever it was hiding in his memory.
Undoubtedly, someone with a better-educated eye than Vail would have been able to narrow down the architecture, someone who would have made a mental note the moment he first saw it and remembered its location. But Vail was the only one who had seen the video stream, and now that image was permanently gone. If he was right and the building was a hundred years old, it would most likely be around other old buildings. He thought about the house on Spring Street. One of the buildings next to it, not the scrap yard, but the one on the other side, had “Est. 1883” painted on a wall. That was certainly a century old, and the neighborhood had a mix of residential and commercial properties. He made a U-turn and sped off toward Spring Street.
Once he arrived at the house, Vail got out and scanned the neighborhood. He didn’t see anything resembling the ornate two-story building. But the day he thought he had seen it, he and Kate had set up a block away. He drove to the spot, turned the car around, and pulled to the curb.
After getting out, he slowly turned in all directions. Then, in the distance, he spotted it. It was illuminated in the rain by a halo caused by the streetlights. He put the car in gear and sped toward it. When he got closer, he started driving cautiously, searching the surrounding buildings from which Tye’s PDA could have sent the stream.
The rain was coming down harder now, making his recollection of the video even more difficult. When he got a little closer, he climbed out of the car, ignoring the downpour. There was only one building that it could have been shot from. It was a small three-story hotel, the kind that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, a bar on the first floor and fewer than ten rooms on the second and third floors.
He could read the sign now—“The Lindbergh Hotel.” There were four windows on each of the upper floors that were a possibility. Vail closed his eyes and tried to remember the angle of the video to figure out whether it was from the second or third floor, but then decided he couldn’t chance being wrong.
A few doors down from the hotel, he pulled crookedly to the curb on the same side of the street and jumped out. No longer having a handgun, he went to the trunk and took out the shotgun. The rain was now a good thing, he decided; it had chased everyone indoors. He loaded the magazine with double-aught buck shells, filling one jacket pocket with deer slugs and the other with more double-aught. He held the weapon down at his side as inconspicuously as possible.
Immediately next door to the bar was the hotel’s door. Vail tried it but it was locked with a thick metal plate, ensuring that even if he’d had a Halligan, it would have been difficult to open discreetly. That left going into the bar. A dangerous thing with a shotgun in hand.
The bar was small and dingy. Only four customers were inside, all of them sitting at the bar and looking comfortable. They had to be regulars. Vail knew that as long as he didn’t interfere with their drinking, they